


To Love As You Do

by FourLawsSafe



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: I'm Bad At Tagging, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-07
Updated: 2016-12-07
Packaged: 2018-09-07 01:20:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8777449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FourLawsSafe/pseuds/FourLawsSafe
Summary: Garak pines after the sexy young doctor who has recently come to the station, and believes his attraction may be returned when he finds an intruder in his quarters.





	

He hadn’t thought he would feel anything ever again. The wire took his anguish and smoothed it to a gentle despair, averaging out highs and lows (almost, he knew, entirely lows, or he would not have resorted to this in the first place). It numbed him and comforted him and sang him to sleep so that he surfed through his tedious days and restless nights without a whimper, without complaint. Plain, simple Garak. It was a relief to be simple, after everything, after exile. Everything he had done so shrunken with distance that he could convince himself to live, even just for today, and maybe tomorrow, too.  
  
And then tomorrow came and he saw a beautiful smooth face across the Promenade, clearly discovering for the first time the polymer-scented menu of the Replimat, a tousle-haired young alien whose dark, sleepy eyes intrigued him so much he closed the shop early and rushed home to peruse Odo’s security files via his private backdoor. A doctor. Imagine his joy when he discovered the man had requested this post and would remain indefinitely. He dreamed, that night, for the first time in almost a year. Of long, delicate hands and a surgeon’s precision touch on his ridges. He woke to find himself stroking his vent, head half-extended and slick.  Half was more than he had managed since the day he threw the remote in a desk drawer for the last time. Hazily, through a fog of endorphins, his body told him what it needed, and he obliged. He wondered if this man liked clothes. He vowed to wrap him in Tholian silk and learn human erogenous zones.  
  
In the chilly light of the morning corridor rush to work and duty stations, doubt assailed him. He would have to move slowly. The files said the man’s past partners had all been female, and either human or so human-like as to pass easily from a distance. This might be hopeless. A good spy would gather more information before determining the feasibility of attacking a target. He learned the location of the man’s quarters, cloned himself a door code from Odo’s security overrides almost by reflex. He learned his habits, and often stood in the doorway to the shop, cheerfully greeting passersby, as the man came toward the Replimat for lunch. Once, their eyes met, and he sensed a fierce intelligence behind that calm gaze, a questing curiosity, never satisfied, but it slid away as the line moved. He was more hungry than he was interested in just another middle-aged shopkeeper, even one who tended to stand out in the station’s new demographic mix.  
  
Lunch would be his opening. Humans loved setting specific times for meals. All he had to do was wander over for a cup of rokassa. Their eyes would meet. He would introduce himself. He waited a week to steel himself, then lost his nerve three days in a row, strolling back to his shop with the steaming mug in hand, gulping it guiltily so the smell wouldn’t linger and seep into the merchandise. Bajorans and humans had sensitive noses, and they didn’t seem to much like hot fish juice.  
  
One day he stood in one of the changing rooms and appraised himself. He was wearing his favorite striped sweater and vest for courage. He sucked in his gut, told himself he was still handsome. “A disciplined mind,” he said to his reflection. This was ridiculous. He had slaughtered a dozen targets with less emotional fallout than one dream. “A disciplined Cardassian mind can overcome any obstacle.”  
  
He came on too strong. Once he was there, talking to him, sitting across from him, clearly making him nervous with his starving eyes running over every inch of him, he knew he was making a mistake, but he couldn’t stop. He was a mess, sick with love for this man he had never spoken to before today. The wire steadied him, let him smoothly state his case, and then he was up and leaving, and — oh, that narrow, graceful neck, those slim shoulders! His hands were on them before he could clear his head. He stuttered out some inanity about making new friends. He fled.  
  
It was just his luck that those two awful Klingon women would show up when he was too distracted to notice or prepare for another possible attempt on his life. One of them took a lazy swing at him, and he saw his hand come up in slow motion, like swimming in syrupy old kanar. She could have killed him there, and it was only luck that she had other things on her mind. When they had concluded their negotiations and left, he stood in the center of the store, breathing deeply, and tried not to imagine the walls closing in.  
  
But then it was so natural to go to Quark’s and take his usual table, and so it was natural for the young doctor to slide into the seat across from him, and so it was only so very natural to make him his Starfleet contact. He should have found one as soon as the Federation took over the station. He hadn’t been thinking like a spy, the wire drowning his old habits in warm white noise. He couldn’t be sure he was thinking like a spy, even now, because a spy would not mix business and pleasure unless he wanted to die.  
  
They began to meet for lunch. Something about him caught the man’s interest. The man liked secrets, and Garak had more than he could keep straight in his permanently altered state. The fact of his secrets was, in itself, a secret, but the worst-kept one on the station. He denied it all with winking insincerity, aware that his reputation among the Bajorans might be all that was keeping him alive.  
  
He could see that vast intellect, sometimes, trying to reason out its own fixation, those warm bright eyes lingering heavy-lidded on his face, his chest. But the man’s secret, slowly teased out of him through offhand remarks and discussions of other topics, was this: he was woefully inexperienced in the arts of love. He had had a series of shallow, short relationships throughout his adult life, leaving a trail of broken hearts from Earth to this far, forsaken oversized caltrop at the edge of Federation territory. They mainly did the same things in the same sorts of configurations, and when he got tired of this baseline, he ended the relationship rather than let it advance. The women even looked the same. He said he had a type, laughing, a little embarrassed, but Garak knew from his perusal of human entertainment media that it was a very boring type, one imposed by his culture. Garak suspected - or perhaps only hoped - he did not know himself. Not yet.  
  
Garak did his best to draw him out. He felt so shy, after that first, explosive meeting, all his confidence drained away, his electric attraction grounded by the wire. He dreamed, but could not again bring himself to completion. He never touched the man himself, terrified of sudden movement, of breaking the fragile web of connection they were spinning, thread by conversational thread, into something like a friendship. He read extensively on human culture, human male friendships, standard-plan human male bodies, their strange dangling fruits and smooth recesses. He dreamed. He came to live for those lunches.

 

*

  
  
And so the man’s presence in his quarters was not, at first, unwelcome. He knew as soon as he came in after a bizarre day at the shop that someone was here, but knew in the same instant that it was someone he desperately wanted to trust, that delicate musky scent that tormented him through long Replimat sessions drifting on the air circulator’s breeze.  
  
It had been a long, strange day, and he was tired. He had known the doctor was having dinner with the latest object of his affections - the Trill science officer, of all people! Garak could have told him his pursuit was in vain, but it gave him a small thrill to see the man pursue someone so much older than himself, even as he secretly flinched in sympathy as this dear naive genius idiot was rebuffed over and over again. He was, as Dax had been known to say, so very young, so unable to imagine that someone he wanted might not want him in return, while Garak spent his nights overcome with doubt and lists of all the many reasons he should break off his own pursuit.  
  
Then the environmental controls had broken down when he was preparing to close up for the evening, flooding the Promenade with white, fluffy, unnatural flakes of solidified water that burned his face when he opened the door for a better look. He had decided to stay inside until the problem was resolved, even made preparations to spend a chilly, uncomfortable night in one of the dressing rooms if necessary, but after a couple of hours the “snow” had dissipated. Then some botched live animal shipment had loosed a pair of large birds into the public areas as he left. He admitted it had been funny to watch Odo and his team chasing the things around and around the ring, somehow unable to corral them despite the limited number of places for them to go, but he had been quite frayed by then, and plodded off to unit 901 with a sigh. And now there was this - perhaps welcome? - intruder. Had the dinner with Jadzia gone as badly as he hoped?  
  
“Julian?”  
  
And he stepped from the shadow of the bulkhead next to the window, face obscured by a trick of the light, amusement in his voice. “How did you know? No, I know you won’t tell me.”  
  
Garak recovered his equilibrium enough to smile his best secret smile. “I have my ways.” The man was wearing his uniform, but…it hung differently on him, somehow. There was something about his walk, something about his smile as he moved across the one-room apartment toward the door. Toward him. The vestigial spy that monitored his thoughts, the part of him that refused to die, fought its way through a fog of artificial calm and began to scream in his ear. “More importantly, how did you get into my quarters?”  
  
“I have my ways.” He was very close, now. “Look, Garak, I wanted to talk to you about something, and I didn’t know if it would be an…appropriate topic for the Replimat.” There was a hitch in his breath. The musky smell increased as their distance closed. Garak stepped forward as if under a spell, his own breath quickening, the voice of the spy in him telling him to run, RUN, Elim, something was very wrong.  
  
His eyes, dazzled for months by Federation-standard lighting, finally picked out the faint wrinkles at the corners of the man’s mouth as he smiled, the scattering of gray in his wild hair. “You’re not Julian,” said Garak. “Or, at least…” he studied the face. “You’re not *my* Julian.”  
  
“Oh, I’m yours, all right, more than you can possibly know,” said not-Julian, his hand casually passing behind his back and returning with a long knife whose edge glittered a deadly promise.  
  
Garak’s syrupy reflexes finally exploded to life just as the man lunged. He spun left, picking up the small table by the door and flinging it at not-Julian’s legs to trip him. His creaking body told him he was no longer twenty-five, and it had been a very long time since he took advantage of the holosuites’ exercise programs. His right knee blossomed with pain and he stumbled, his right hand groping for the door switch. He had long ago disabled the computer’s ability to monitor his voice in here, because if the computer could monitor him, then so could anyone else with half an interest in hacking. If he could just get outside, call for help…But his fingers scrabbled at empty wall as he tipped over, a useless civilian, the spy in him roaring with anger at his clumsiness. He and not-Julian scrambled to their feet, the false doctor now between him and the door.  
  
Garak had an illegal phaser in his quarters. He would have preferred a disruptor, but it was hard to torture information out of a dead assassin, and disruptors didn’t generally have a stun setting. In fact, he had two phasers, but in crystal-clear hindsight he realized he hadn’t charged the one near the replicator in over a year. He turned and flung himself desperately across the center of the room, toward the bed in the far right corner, toward the second gun that made a barely-felt lump under his mattress every night. Not-Julian caught him in midair and sent them both careening against the frame. Garak struck his head and felt a lance of unaccustomed pain cut through the fog. Strange, the wire was supposed to mask that entirely. He recovered first and kicked the non-doctor’s knife hand away; rising to a crouch, he slipped his hand into the hollow pocket under his pillow like he had practiced a hundred times.  
  
The gun wasn’t there.  
  
Of course an assassin who had free access to his room would search said room for weapons. Garak spun in a crouch and formed his hands into claws, raking the younger man across the face and grabbing his wrist as he swung the knife. Not-Julian flinched from his hand and laughed, his fragile skin welling with shocking red blood. “Is this what you want, Garak?” he said. “Is it? To die in your own bed?”  
  
Garak had one hand around the wrist holding the knife, his other arm bracing not-Julian’s chest, but the other man bent him easily back over the mattress, astonishingly strong for his frame. Well, he was an athlete, and Garak was in the worst shape of his life. There was some shame, he supposed, trying to resign himself, in being ambushed in your own quarters, but no shame at all in being killed by your physical superior in such an attack.  
  
But the spy in Garak reminded him he was still powerfully built, still had his hands, each of which had crushed the life from more than one throat, had snapped bones with his grip alone.  
  
“Drop it or I’ll break your wrist,” he spat, minutely adjusting his fingers around the knife hand. He knew he could do it - Julian had beautiful wrists, thin and delicate, ridgeless and soft. His opponent paused, leaning over him, assessing their stalemate.  
  
Garak became extremely aware that he was bent nearly flat over his mattress, Julian’s body (or a very good facsimile) pressed against him, hips crushed together, neatly pinning his legs so that he couldn’t get his feet under him and throw the attacker off. Their ragged breath mingled in the warm air. Not-Julian’s eyes widened and something stirred between them at the level of Garak’s groin, something that lifted and pushed seemingly with a mind of its own.  
  
Garak found enough air to laugh in the stranger’s face. “You could have shot me the second I opened the door, my friend. Why the theatrics, why the knife? And who are you, really?”  
  
The face, so close, so like his beloved’s, pressed into a scowl that revealed its many lines. A faint gray stubble sprinkled the jawline. This Julian was older than he had thought, perhaps as old as Garak himself, but he had taken much better care of his body. The thing between them stirred again, and then not-Julian heaved himself backward, sliding his wrist through Garak’s numbing fingertips. His hand passed behind his back again, and returned without the knife.  
  
“I’m from the future,” he said. “I was sent to kill you.”  
  
Garak straightened up, moving right so he was no longer backed against the bed, though he noticed the assassin casually shifted to keep himself between him and the door. He managed a smile. “And what new enemy have I made in the future, who would go to such lengths as to defile the very fabric of time to make sure I don’t live past today?”  
  
His assassin chuckled, and here Garak could see a little of the carefree, overgrown boy he used to be. “No one new, Elim. Only yourself, and your regrets.”  
  
The answer left him, for once, speechless. He could feel his jaw hanging open. “I hired an assassin for *myself*? How convoluted are my future problems that this makes any sense?”  
  
The man began to pace in front of the door, scratching his head, full of nervous energy. “Convoluted,” he said. “But also simple. You made some choices you aren’t proud of. You came to the conclusion that it would be best for everyone if you had died instead.” This older Julian talked with his hands, now, in a way that Garak found familiar, though he couldn’t quite chase down the idea with most of his focus on whether or not he was about to die. The man corkscrewed his finger around his temple. “Here, because it’s quiet. Now, because you’re so, so twisted up with that little coil in your head that you’re the weakest you’ve ever been.”  
  
A void opened in Garak’s chest, and he kept his face composed only through great effort. He knew. That this scruffy, grizzled, bitter future iteration of the naive prodigy he had been mooning over for months knew his most closely-guarded secret did more to convince him than words alone. This was too elaborate a charade even for Tain, too intricately geared to his embarrassing weakness and towering lust to be anything but Garak playing a darkly hilarious trick on himself.  
  
“And still, I ask,” he said, inclining his head and looking at Julian sidelong, “Why the knife, when it puts you at that much greater risk of failure?”  
  
Julian’s nostrils flared as he looked at him. He paced, like a caged animal, the exact dimensions of a Cardassian interrogation cell. Garak could count the steps in his sleep. Was his future self trying to send him a message, packaged neatly in the one body he knew would hold all his wire-drained attention? “It was my idea,” he said at last. “A kind of…personal justice. To bring you your own head, if killing you splits off a new timeline and leaves mine unharmed. To vanish into thin air, if it causes my future to never have existed.”  
  
“What a clever and, dare I say it, _romantic_ gesture,” Garak said, testing the waters. Julian flinched a little at the word, but did not hasten to deny any part of it. He edged toward the replicator, and Julian raised his hand as if to draw the knife again. “Do you still like Tarkalian tea?”  
  
“I — yes,” said Julian.  
  
Garak went across the room and around the little eating table to the replicator and, ostentatiously turning his back, keyed in the order. At the same time, he pressed on a panel in the bulkhead, which loosened and spun around, revealing a slightly dusty old-model phaser pistol. One step back, and he kicked upward and behind himself, tilting and flinging the cheap little table into the air between them just as the knife buried itself to the hilt in the replicated wood with a solid thunk. As the table fell with a crash, he ripped the phaser free from its wall mount, spun, and fired.  
  
The assassin had been halfway across the room already. He staggered backward and crashed against the bed, doubled over. Garak checked the setting on the pistol: high enough to kill, but its charge was so depleted he didn’t know its actual effect. He set it to regular stun and fired again, just to be sure. The gun gave a little whine and played a faint, useless light over the still form at the foot of the bed. He tossed it aside, disgusted with himself for letting his defenses crumble so far.  
  
First things first: he took a sip of tea, watching the body for signs of movement. When none were forthcoming, he put the mug back in the replicator and strode forward, wincing as he put weight on his blown knee, kicking it onto its stomach. Don’t think of it as Julian. Think of it as one more assassin you outsmarted.  
  
He couldn’t find the sheath that had held the knife. Not-Julian’s uniform back was smooth and unbroken as they usually were. Some kind of subspace technology, he thought. A pocket that would show up on no sensors, that no one could pick. Clever. He had drifted off to sleep once, as a younger man, thinking about how technological advances like this one could further the spying industry. Well, he would just have to secure the hands.  
  
He heaved the unconscious form up onto the bed and went back to the replicator. _Quickly, now. Before he wakes up. There is so much work to be done._ How many secrets could a man from the future tell? What should he ask about first? In his old career, he had had days to craft the perfect interrogation, every question designed to provoke more. His mind raced as he dialed with a trembling finger. He found himself breathing hard, his vent contracting. _Not now!_  
  
“Business, not pleasure,” he muttered to himself, returning to the bed with a long cord in several sections. Julian was perfectly inert until Garak bent to lift his eyelid, at which point the human grabbed his collar in an inhumanly powerful grip and hauled him down and forward until their faces nearly touched.  
  
“But you always mixed business and pleasure, Elim,” Julian spat. His slitted eyes were very green in this light. “Your father knew he had a monster on a leash, and he kept it as short as he could, but you always wanted to push the boundaries, didn’t you? All for Cardassia, ha! You got off on it. You _loved_ it.”  
  
Garak struggled in his grip, banging his injured knee on the bedframe, choking. His demurely narrow collar was twisted up in Julian’s iron-hard fingers, the other man’s knuckles cutting off his air even as the fabric did extremely distracting things to his neck ridges. He should have been fighting like a razorcat, should have pummeled that twisted face inches away, should have gouged out Julian’s eyes, but he hung transfixed in that gaze, aware only that his vision was beginning to blacken at the edges, that his chest was pressed to Julian’s, that as he had stumbled forward he had unthinkingly thrown one leg over the edge of the bed and now it was resting between Julian’s knees.  
  
“The only person you could never kill was yourself,” said Julian conversationally, arching his back and reaching behind himself with his other hand. “You’ve been waiting for this day for years, but you couldn’t even do it on your own. You had to send a fellow professional, one you trained yourself, one you taught all your own weaknesses. You had to convince him that he was putting you out of your misery.” He drew another knife, identical to the first. “Fitting, really, to undo so many of your mistakes using the person you created while making them. I’m going to enjoy this.”  
  
Garak took his hands away from his collar, put them on Julian’s shoulders instead, and heaved himself upward as the knife rose to gut him. The very tip sank into the soft area at his groin, glanced off his belly scales with a scraping sound, and barely missed his throat as he came back down, throwing his entire weight onto the assassin and using his elbow to slam the man’s knife hand back down at an impossible angle. He heard the wrist snap even as Julian’s face grayed and sweat stood out on his forehead. His eyes rolled and he went limp, not quite unconscious, but no longer fighting, either. The grip on Garak’s collar relaxed and he collapsed on top of Julian, gasping for breath. He heard the knife clatter to the floor.  
  
He raised himself off Julian again and looked down to be sure. The blade had laid his flimsy clothes open from vent to collarbone, but there was surprisingly little blood. He looked back at Julian’s face. His eyes were open, if glassy.  
  
“Well,” the man said, smiling that bitter smile, one that Garak finally recognized from his own dressing-room mirror. “Isn’t this a pickle.”  
  
Garak kissed him. He couldn’t resist any longer. He had never been so consumed with lust in his life. Julian might have seven other knives hidden cleverly about his person, could bleed him dry and cut off his head and go home with it, but still he would have this kiss, and he would die smiling. Julian leaned into it, opening his teeth and accepting Garak’s questing tongue. Soft. Humans were so soft, all over. He moaned and tore himself away, lifting his other leg onto the bed, rising onto hands and knees, his legs trapping Julian’s in place, the human’s erection visible through the thin material of his borrowed uniform. He had watched the instructional videos. He knew what that meant.  
  
What had happened between them, all those future years, to make Julian as twisted up with anger and lust and despair as Garak himself? He didn’t care. There was only this moment, perhaps the last moment of his life, and he would take what was offered, no matter the danger, no matter the price. He reached over Julian’s shoulder and fumbled for the knife, tip still slick with his own blood. He tucked it under the collar of Julian’s uniform and slashed downward, lifting carefully so that only the fabric ripped, opening the other man’s clothes as Julian had done his own, and his erstwhile assassin offered no resistance.  
  
Garak was so eager his organ tumbled out of him nearly full-length already, a dripping corkscrew coil of flat muscle that straightened and inflated rapidly. The head, black and engorged, rose and hovered between them, questing back and forth with sinuous grace. Julian sighed and traced one of Garak’s eye ridges with the fingertips of his working hand. Garak hovered in the moment, relishing. How many times had he fantasized about a moment just…like…this?  
  
And then he hesitated.  
  
“What’s wrong?” said Julian, his good hand pulling back. “This is what you want, isn’t it?”  
  
Garak scrambled away from him and stepped off the bed, gathering his ruined clothes in a pathetic attempt to cover himself. He was gasping again, an incipient panic attack threatening to overwhelm his senses. “Yes,” he said tightly, watching the slim form on the bed, brown and sleekly muscled and still visibly erect. “It is exactly what I want. Which is why I can’t trust it.”  
  
“What is there not to trust, Garak?” said Julian, a trifle sarcastically, spreading his arms and smiling at the ceiling as if looking for enlightenment. “Other than the fact that I just tried to gut you alive, or the fact that you’re stupid as a Pak’led with that implant running your brain into the ground, or the fact that you never tell the truth to anyone, not even your lover, not even yourself?”  
  
“I’m not…this isn’t real,” said Garak, blinking and shaking his head as if to clear it. “Julian and I are friends, yes, but not very close. He’s very open about himself, to a point, but I don’t feel that I really know him yet. There are things my mind has to insert into my mental picture of him, and adjust as contrary evidence arises. Gestures, turns of phrase, a certain way of smiling.”  
  
The thing that wasn’t Julian paused. “Ah.” He sat up, putting his legs together over the side of the bed and swinging them like a bored child, completely unselfconscious of his nakedness. “Well, I suppose the jig, as they say, is up. I’m disappointed. I really thought you would take this fantasy all the way, but clearly you don’t have enough imagination.”  
  
Garak laughed, trying and failing to keep a rising hysteria out of his voice. “I thought you acted a little too much like me, but now you sound like my father.”  
  
“And whose fault is that, Elim?” Not-Julian said quietly. “It’s your head, you know.”  
  
_It’s my fear of becoming Tain._ Garak gave up on trying to gather the shreds of his clothes and picked up his bathrobe from its hook near the window, cinching it snugly around his waist. His organ retreated back into him, deflated, disappointed. He didn’t feel quite so exposed, now, even as he was coming to realize this thing that wasn’t his beloved could read his mind like an enigma tale. Now that they were conversing pleasantly, it fell on him to be pleasant. He swallowed an enormous knot of fear and sat in the chair behind the desk, putting his back to the presence and gazing into space. All that distance made the choking feeling retreat. A little.  
  
“I could still kill you, if you like,” said Not-Julian from behind him.  
  
“No, I don’t think that will be necessary, thank you,” said Garak politely, staring straight ahead, but curiosity — and yes, lust, even now — won out. He had to look. He turned halfway and put his arm on the desk, balling his aching hand into a fist. “Please tell me what you are.”  
  
The thing rolled Julian’s eyes. “Oh, fine. I have to go soon, anyway. Your leader is about to figure us out.” The Red Alert siren began to sound in the hallway, and the entire station shuddered. Garak hadn’t felt such a shake since the last time he’d been on a ship under fire. He half-started out of the chair, but the assassin waved it off airily with his unbroken hand. “Ignore that, they’re just responding to another illusion.”  
  
Garak sat heavily back, his knee continuing to express its displeasure at today's activities. “Is that what you are? An illusion? I can’t decide whether to be disappointed or relieved.”  
  
“We’re not from your, what would you call it, your plane. Your part of the galaxy, at least. We’re studying how your imaginations work. I didn’t want to come, but it was...required for our group. A little like orders, and a little like mandatory course credit.” Not-Julian smiled slowly, leaning back on the bed with his unbroken arm, striking a pose. “I can’t explain it any better with this alarmingly handsome mouth I created from your mind. Are you sure you don’t want to…”  
  
Garak cut him off impatiently, holding onto the edge of the desk as the station shuddered and shook, rumbling its structural distress. “So this Julian-from-the-future story was spun entirely from…my imagination?”  
  
“Well, you did in fact play an excellent joke on yourself,” said Not-Julian. “Just not in the way you thought. I must say, Elim, you have a very convoluted mind compared to many of the other creatures on this station. It’s been a pleasure to explore it with you.” The shuddering and rumbling faded, and the Red Alert siren cut off. He stood up, suddenly all business despite his comically shredded uniform, and shook his broken wrist so it flopped sickeningly. “Yes, very interesting. Well, time to go.”  
  
“Wait.” Garak held up a hand. “If you’re not from our plane, you might not experience linear time the way we do. Was any part of this based on real future events? Was this a Julian who might really exist someday, or just a figment of my, shall we say…” He swallowed uncomfortably. “Adolescent appetite?”  
  
Not-Julian fixed him with a cool stare. “Why should I tell you the truth, Elim, when you yourself tell only lies?” In that moment he was so like the real thing Garak’s breath caught and he had to swallow again.  
  
“Lie to me, then,” Garak said, and to his surprise felt real tears prick at the corners of his eyes. His voice broke embarrassingly. “Anything. Please.”  
  
The familiar face settled into a look that was not very like the real Julian at all. Garak thought he didn’t recognize anything of himself there, either, or anyone he knew. “We draw from time to perfect our illusions,” he said at last. “In service to the false, we recreate the real. But your ‘linear time,’ as you call it, is as convoluted as your mind, Elim. I don’t know whether I got it right, or whether it will stay right, now that I’ve altered your starting conditions. We aim to touch you creatures in harmless ways, just to gather information, but I wonder…if it is not unkind, to do this to you.” He turned away and stood facing the door, hands behind his back. “I wish you luck. He does not know how to love as you do.” One step forward, and he faded into the air, as if he had never been.  
  
Garak put his arm back in his lap and faced the window again. He sat perfectly rigid for a long time, going over every detail of the corporeal image the alien had summoned from the depths of his sordid fantasies. The good doctor, but one who Garak had trained himself, who had regrets of his own, who loved or hated - or both - some imaginary future Garak enough to undertake a dangerous, possibly suicidal mission. He touched his aching head where it had struck the bedframe, wondering whether he had damaged something, opened his robe again to look at his bruises and scrapes and the ruins of one of his favorite outfits, and, suddenly, jumped to his feet, rushing to the fallen table by the replicator. The first knife was still embedded in the wood, forgotten. He pulled it out with some difficulty and spun it in his hands, testing the balance.  
  
“Saying he doesn’t know _how_ is not the same as saying he is not _capable_ of it,” he said to the empty room. “I’ll just have to take it slow.” And maybe get back to exercising. It really was insulting, how easily the false Julian had overpowered him. He must do better, for the real one’s sake.

 

*

  
  
“Doctor, you seem far away, today,” said Garak, gesturing around the Promenade with his spoonful of spice pudding. “Did dinner with the lovely Jadzia go as badly as all that?”  
  
Julian visibly flinched at her name. “No, er,” he said. “We’re not, I mean…It’s over. I’m done trying to…I mean…” he trailed off, staring sightlessly at his nearly empty plate. “I’m just tired, all right? I was up almost all night with this extradimensional incursion problem and I’m not running on full impulse today.”  
  
“Ah, the imaginary creatures.” Garak had been gratified to learn that he was not the only one to have a strange, embarrassing, or simply bizarre visitor, but that not everyone had, so his secret was safe. Some station residents gossiped freely about this or that manifestation of the Prophets, dead loved ones returning for one last conversation, or children’s entertainment characters appearing to play with little Roka half the night. Others kept their counsel. Only one shopper casually asked him whether he had seen anything, and he just as casually replied that he had gone home and straight to bed after the freak snowstorm, and - regretfully, to be sure - slept through the whole thing.

His scrapes and bruises were hidden under his clothes and his hair, and he was careful not to limp while in the keen-eyed doctor's presence. “Tell me, my dear doctor, did you experience anything…odd, while performing your duties? Someone said there was a strange little creature from human mythology roaming Ops, trying to bargain for ownership of Chief O’Brien’s daughter, and no one could get rid of him.”  
  
Garak knew very well that Julian had had an embarrassingly empty-headed and lusty Jadzia clone glued to him all night, but he wanted to hear him say it, or not. How much of such a private thing laid bare would he share with his occasional lunch partner, who barely yet qualified as a friend?  
  
“I, uh.” Julian scratched his head, looking everywhere but at him. “I don’t want to talk about it, Garak, if you don’t mind.”  
  
“Oh, well, in that case, I will let the matter drop.” Garak let only a shred of his disappointment show. “I hope I am not intruding too much into your personal life if I say that you should not be discouraged at this setback. There are plenty of other people on the station who would be, I’m sure, interested in one of Starfleet’s finest young doctors, people without Jadzia’s…hang-ups, I suppose, for lack of a better word.”  
  
“She is a little snobby sometimes, isn’t she?” said Julian, brightening. “I thought I was just imagining it because I was so, um. But where does she get off, looking down on everyone, just because she has so many lifetimes of memories?” His half-smile faded and he looked surprised. “Oh, but I shouldn’t say that. She’s a brilliant crewmate, and I hope we can still be friends, even if she inexplicably refuses to date me.”  
  
Garak spread his hands, smiling beneficently. “I’m sure you can. In fact, you must. It’s a small station, and it’s not like you can avoid each other forever.”  
  
Julian put his chin on one fist, poking the remains of his meal with a fork. “Thanks, Garak, I appreciate your perspective. It’s not too personal at all. And I know there are plenty of women around. I’m just not, well, not used to being refused! Kind of childish, isn’t it?” His laugh came out forced. Garak noted the “women” and almost didn’t hear the rest. _He does not know how to love as you do._ He rubbed his hands together, suddenly cold.  
  
“Well, I believe I’m finished, so I won’t keep you, doctor,” he said. “Perhaps matters will not seem so dire after a good night’s rest.” They parted with halfhearted goodbyes, both turned inward, abstracted. Garak went to the shop and sat behind his desk, running a trader’s cloth sample through his fingers again and again, Not-Julian's final words bouncing around the inside of his skull. _He does not know how to love. He does not know._

“No,” he said. “He does. He will.” He did not know what sort of timeline had created the figment of last night, and he couldn’t help but feel guilty at how the idea of a Julian who understood him intimately, had struggled and made difficult decisions as he had, excited him. But he knew decisions about the doctor’s future were not his to make. Julian must come to him, must be given the choice, or Garak was no better than his father, who had molded an impressionable youth into his perfect espionage machine with no thought for that machine’s preferences.  
  
He would have to take it slow. He would have to be patient. He would wait for the dear doctor to see what was right in front of him, and make the first move.

**Author's Note:**

> There is not nearly enough Garak in the first couple seasons. I set this during S1E15, "If Wishes Were Horses", but didn't want to spoil the whole thing by noting that at the beginning. Garak doesn't show up in this episode, but CLEARLY if he'd had an imaginary manifestation of his own, we all know who it would be. The rest is just the incredibly convoluted stories he would tell himself to make sense of it all, the physical evidence of his fears and hopes for a relationship that, at this point in time, is only beginning.
> 
> I'm a brand-new convert to DS9 and am aware that ~*G/B OTP 4-EVA*~ is, er, EXTREMELY popular on this site, but I haven't had time to read most of what's out there yet, so apologies if this is retreading ideas someone else has already covered. I wanted to explore how Garak confuses or deliberately mixes duty and love throughout the show, how his image of himself is bound up in a surprisingly rigid concept of fidelity to his civilization and the people he cares about. It's a goddamn crime they never got together in continuity, as the vast number of Garak/Bashir fics attests, but I don't want to rewrite the series, only contextualize what's been presented in canon.


End file.
